cywu: youth workers look out, and up
WORKERS, APRIL 2003 ISSUE
THE COMMUNITY AND YOUTH Workers Union (CYWU) will be holding their National Conference 3-6 from April at Rhegged, Penrith. The CYWU has been and still is at the forefront of the trade unions opposing the single currency. Among other items on the agenda are resolutions against the Euro and against the war on Iraq.
It is hoped that the CYWU will come out unanimously against the war. Many activists from CYWU attended the anti war march in London and are active in their local communities campaigning against the war.
At the conference the union will seek to consolidate the gains made at last year’s conference to become more effective for its members in collective negotiations and to rebuild branch life. The union has agreed to reverse years of inward-looking equal opportunities work with outward-looking equal rights work, campaigning for improvement in members’ conditions of service and against their exploitation at the workplace.
The CYWU has never had any tolerance of discrimination at work, but by creating a new campaigning committee to concentrate on real practical changes in the work-place the union is seeking to engage the majority of youth workers, community workers, learning mentors and personal advisers in meaningful work to organise every single workplace.
While having forward looking policies on a range of national and international issues, CYWU needs to ensure that it is tightly organised around the key bread and butter issues of trade unions. Two years of expert and successful casework support for members shows that the national office of the union can do the business. But what is needed now is a commitment to collective organisation on the ground, involving more and better support branch officers.
CYWU is one of the few unions in recent months not to have taken up the pay fight as the central organising issue around which unions are attractive to members. While new government initiatives and professional expectations have given CYWU much more work to do and their skills have been recognised by a range of agencies as being essential to their service delivery, the JNC rates of pay for youth and community workers have gone down sharply in value.
Most groups of workers would use this opportunity of increased demand for their labour and a recruitment and retention crisis to assert the importance of proper pay. Youth and community workers have if anything gone in the other direction. If this neglect of pay and conditions struggles continues there will be no point having a union for workers in this sector at all.